This book's expansive title promises rather more than what it actually delivers, in that it is not an account of the British occupation of the conquered Boer republics during the 1899–1902 war nor, for that matter, is it a study of the transient Boer commando occupations of bits of the British colonies in the Cape and Natal during hostilities. It is, instead, more modest in its scope and subject and is probably all the better for that. In other words, John Boje's An Imperfect Occupation is an instance of history reduced but rewarding.

Published in a timely (for our time) new ‘History of Military Occupation’ series under the distinguished general editorship of John Laband and Ian Beckett, this volume is a micro-study of the wartime experience of a single farming region of the Orange Free State, the district of Winburg. Dr Boje, whose own Winburg family endured the South African War in some highly imaginative ways, charts the tangled history of this area from Britain's imposition of military rule in the early months of 1900, through to peace, reconstruction, and the early years of Union after 1910.

The author tops and tails this evocative story with clear, compressed sketches of the prewar character of the Winburg district, of the agonizing circumstances in which the Orange Free State found itself tugged into war on the coat-tails of the Transvaal, and of the early unfolding of the post-1902 peace and formation of a segregationist Union in 1910. The conclusion of An Imperfect Occupation is, of course, the drearily familiar summary – while the beaten Boers were assisted by their former imperial enemy to regain their feet, the country's black inhabitants, who had also been pitched into the war, ‘were left out in the cold’ in order to ‘promote white accord’ (179). And, as John Boje reminds us, in the run-up to Union, the Orange River Colony Native Congress met at Winburg in February 1909 to register its objection to the discriminatory terms of the looming act of white unification. So, no surprises at either end of this book.

The surprise – or, perhaps, more the freshness – lies in the kernel of the volume, the half-dozen meticulously-researched and highly-informative chapters that document the everyday wartime experiences of the men and women who made up the community of Winburg, white and black. Dr Boje is scrupulous in recording the undulating fortunes of an enormous range of individuals who lived through the British occupation in varied ways – opposing, resisting, collaborating, complying, fleeing, and so on. This grainy spectrum of motivations, choices, and dead ends is set beneath a – thankfully light – crust of stodgy political theory in which armed occupation has the dual objective of ‘material reconstruction that will win the hearts and minds of a conquered people and the creation of a new political order by means of which the erstwhile enemy is transformed into a trusted ally’. The viability of such an outcome is also dependent on ‘credible guarantees of the occupying power's intention to withdraw’ (181). In Winburg, the colonial administration did a good job of doing what had to be done, tending to the reconstruction needs of Boer society and lining up with its former adversaries to put back in their place those Africans who they believed had grown too big for their boots during the unsettled years of war.

What gives An Imperfect Occupation its strikingly humane dimension is the author's eye for detail, as in the memory of one African concentration camp victim, Emily Pooe, who recalled that hungry inmates were not permitted to eat green corn because it would have cut official maize production targets. Or as in the vignette that John Boje provides of the mixed-up Acton brothers of Winburg town. Richard Acton, English-speaking and Catholic, threw in his lot with Orange Free State forces, from a declared sense of duty. On the other hand, his elder brother, Francis Acton, was more empire-minded; he died serving in British ranks. There could scarcely have been a more poignant illustration of the war's contested personal loyalties. As such family divisions showed, the internal strains of civil war ran alongside the conventional animosities of the Anglo-Boer conflict.

An almost unremittingly grim and grimy potpourri of life on the southern Highveldt under the heel of British military government, what Dr Boje's book does is to take the temperature of this war, deep down and within a confined space. While it traverses some familiar historiographical ground, his depiction of such stock matters as the attitudes of Boer women and the politicizing impact of the war upon ordinary Africans brings an immediacy to his subject. While one may quibble over the use here and there of oddly modern notions, like ‘an idealized perception of British nonracialism’ (139) – nonracialism would surely have baffled both rulers and subjects of the Victorian and Edwardian Empire – An Imperfect Occupation offers a compelling picture of life in the Orange Free State in a momentous, terrible and often grotesque time of near-total war.